Thanks Priaptor.
I'm quite amazed at what I've ended up with, really beyond my expectations of what could be achieved in my house with speakers of that size (each between fireplace and window) and location (<1 ft from rear wall).
And of course, I promised my wife that they would be more attractive than my 20 year old speakers (b&w801) and I find them visually stunning as well.
It all started with the headphone system, Stax 009 and a BHSE amp (end game, check).
That was so resolving that I looked at upgrading my old Wadia DAC, a long search that end with the D1-dual from TotalDAC which forced me to change my system to fully balanced to capture the fully balanced DAC benefits.
That combo is scary good, creating dynamic shades that could stop me in my tracks with the subtleties captured, and running it single ended lost some of the mojo--so balanced it had to be.
When I got the Nola speakers, I had to run them single ended from the DAC since the my VTL monoblocks had no balanced inputs. I thought the speaker system sounded pretty good.
But with too much gain requiring too much digital attenuation at the DAC (20-35dB), I bought a used Pass Aleph P. Putting the attenuation in the analog stage and setting the DAC for -2dB further improved the sound.
The Ayons were recommended by Chris at EastEnd Hifi on Long Island, who I visited during lunch break of a Head-Fi meet in Babylon, NY, and they have proven to be a great match (with switch in triode mode).
Adding the Ayons required replacing my 30' runs of good old Audioquest with Mogami Gold (trying to stay sane with my $ at this point), but in triode mode they further improved the sound, even with my good old 8' runs of Tara Time & Phase II speaker cables.
Last, I went after cables and spent a few months comparing recommendations, with various cables having pros and cons, before hearing the Tungsten/UEF combination which was head and shoulders above the others.
AlanK came by for multiple cable listening sessions and we were almost always in agreement on what we heard. When the Tungsten/UEF went in with the right set of UEF (one silver, one grey), we stared at each other with dropped jaws.
I think his words were "this is it, you're done" or something like that. The other thing we found during the cable listening sessions was that streaming WAV was much superior to streaming FLAC (it was a no-brainer level of obvious).
I had a directory of 10-20 FLAC tracks (most 16/44 but some hi-rez) that we used for evaluation (to which Alan added a few that he was particularly familiar with) and I immediately went to my computer and created a similar directory of WAV files and never looked back.
So, I still have a few things to play with and if there is still something to be squeezed out of the streaming/digital source I'll continue there (currently stream music from NAS to Sonore running a Squeezelite client, the 6TB NAS was one directory with FLAC, another with WAV. As a non-obsessive obsessive type (I don't change equipment a lot, but I do change lots of equipment--if you get what I mean), I'll focus small tweaks going forward like stone under the speakers (bouncy wooden floor), reducing digital noise sources, etc) but my main focus will be listening (woo-hoo!)
What a long strange trip this has been..............
